Strategy Execution by Design Series: Cultural Design

Strategy Execution by Design Series

Lever 7: Culture for Execution
Element 1.2: Cultural Design

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is one of the most quoted lines in business, and it has quietly done a lot of harm.

It tells leaders that culture always wins. So culture becomes a fixed, almost sacred thing. Who we are. What we value. The words you see on the wall in reception.

Here is a different idea. Culture is not who you are. It is what your strategy needs you to be, say and do.

And the cost of getting it wrong is not abstract.

I have watched good strategies, properly funded and well structured, stall completely. Not because the plan was wrong, but because the organisation and’s its people were never shaped to deliver it. The work slowed in the corridors. Decisions crept back up the chain. The hard things went unsaid and nobody could quite point to why.

The pushback is always the same: you cannot design culture, it emerges. That is half right. Culture does emerge, but emerging is not the same as accidental. You do not control a culture, you design the conditions it forms around.

The part most change efforts miss, is that a culture you are trying to shift is not dysfunction. It is adaptation. It formed because at some point it kept people safe, or rewarded, or out of trouble, and they hold onto it because it worked for them.

That is why it fights back. You are asking people to give up something that has protected or promoted them, and they will not do that until the new way feels safer and more rewarding than the old one.

This is why culture belongs at the centre of execution, not at the edge of it. The plan is rarely what fails. The conditions to deliver it are.

None of the building blocks are mine. Edgar Schein showed that the real culture sits below the surface, in the assumptions nobody says out loud. The Emotional Culture Deck makes the case that what people feel drives what they do. And Gustavo Razzetti's Culture Design Canvas maps the gap between the culture you have and the one you need. What I have done in my work, is aim it squarely at execution, and treat culture as one lever in delivering a strategy, not a discipline that stands on its own.

And it is eighteen to twenty-four months of work, not a quarter. Anyone who tells you culture changes faster than that is selling something.

Most organisations can describe the culture they want. Few have designed the culture their strategy needs.

The one-pager in the link below is the method. It starts with the strategy and what it needs people to feel, works through the behaviours and the assumptions underneath, names the gap, then embeds it. It is a loop, not a project: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-reti-4582433b_strategyexecution-executionbydesign-cultureforexecution-activity-7470218175851175937-nIZw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAhmYsQBKppHDyfPTxqHXXgP5MmXRjB7WJs

Written by Rebecca Reti, Strategy & Execution Consultant at Rebecca Reti Consulting.